Poetry By James Lilliefors
I Wanted You to See This
(for Bob Dylan, The Other End, July 3, 1975)
but I can’t get it to stand still
long enough. Can’t pour it
into a cup without
the words going flat.
I remember the wake’s
white fury as the city slipped away,
polished faces staring in awe;
you recall café voices, cigarette tips
flaring, marquee lights,
the Mozart Requiem at St. Sulpice
and the faint applause
of drizzle as we stepped outside,
landing on everyone
just the same.
Our days were nothing but doors back then.
We could have gone anywhere—
Songs were journeys that never came
to a chorus. I couldn’t learn
to raise my hand; you never
learned to lower yours.
It worked out, somehow.
Our dreams wore new clothes
every time we stepped off the boat.
We could have rewritten the world
with the energy we carried
is all I wanted you to see;
what I needed to say—captured
only in basement tapes, bootlegged
in memory but never released.
For years, I could hear the turning of the key.
The click of things about to begin.
How I’d love to feel that now,
to meet you in the village hiss
one more time, nothing
but strangers again.
Immigrants from a Shared Country
The childhood
you remember was different
from mine
though it shared the same
rooms, the same plates
and tables,
the same parents.
And then some.
Things happened.
Dad’s law, Mother’s dying
in secret. Hope held out
in hidden hands;
closed rooms, closets
we couldn’t open.
Never show your hand –
one of the laws.
Even when it’s empty.
But empty your pockets.
Let me see.
We rode our bikes
down the same tree-dappled
drives. Breathed the same poplar
breeze through south-facing screens,
the buttermilk pancake scents,
heard the same muffled sounds of mowers,
and silverware tapping next door,
the themes from Gilligan’s Island
and Brady Bunch.
For a while, you knew the same
nonsense words I knew.
Then the quiet. Unread mail piled up.
Ghosts from the old streets returned,
foreigners heavy in their own skin,
rubbing bellies: ‘Look, I got old.’
‘I went gray.’
But the pink and red hollyhocks
along the fence still manage
to start over each spring. You wondered
if we could do that, too.
I don’t know. We’re no-contact
immigrants now from a shared country.
You’ve changed your name to blend with strangers,
though you live in the same house
you did the last time we spoke
thirty-one years ago.
I’d like to visit sometime–
but your home is no longer
visible, your street does not appear
on any map I own.
